Language style and domain adaptation for cross-language SLU porting

Abstract

Automatic cross-language Spoken Language Understanding porting is plagued by two limitations. First, SLU are usually trained on limited domain corpora. Second, language pair resources (e.g. aligned corpora) are scarce or unmatched in style (e.g. news vs. conversation). We present experiments on automatic style adaptation of the input for the translation systems and their output for SLU. We approach the problem of scarce aligned data by adapting the available parallel data to the target domain using limited in-domain and larger web crawled close-to-domain corpora. SLU performance is optimized by reranking its output with Recurrent Neural Network-based joint language model. We evaluate end-to-end SLU porting on close and distant language pairs: Spanish - Italian and Turkish - Italian; and achieve significant improvements both in translation quality and SLU performance.